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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. has been named in honor of Mary W. Jackson, the first female African American engineer to work at the American space agency. A NASA announcement explains that Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer... View full entry
Since 2012, Hill has surveyed hundreds of structures that she believes once served as a home to enslaved African Americans. More often than not, the buildings bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground. — Atlas Obscura
Writing in Atlas Obscura, writer Sabrina Imbler takes an in-depth look at the work of Jobie Hill, the Iowa City architect who started Saving Slave Houses, a project that aims to catalog, document, and ultimately preserve the remaining "living and working environments of enslaved people" in... View full entry
The latest installment of The New York Times' 1619 Project takes a look at the largely erased built legacy of slavery in America. The article visits a collection of sites that had to be uncovered more or less through original research, as little documentation and few historical markers... View full entry
Since its founding, the National Register of Historic Places has helped to generate an estimated two million jobs and more than a hundred billion dollars in private investments. But, because many biases were written into the criteria that determine how sites are selected, those benefits have gone mostly to white Americans. One of the criteria for preservation is architectural significance, meaning that modest buildings like slave cabins and tenement houses were long excluded from consideration. — The New Yorker
Writing in The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Brent Leggs, director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The lengthy, eye-opening report delves into the work of preservationists like Leggs who are fighting to uncover... View full entry
The Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery, which sits in northeast Houston behind roads peppered with concrete plants and trucking depots, is just one of thousands of eroding African-American cemeteries across the state, in danger of being erased as descendants of those buried have died out, moved out or been pushed out. Many of the cemeteries are long gone. For years, mainstream historians didn’t pay attention to them; now genealogists, historians and families are rushing to save them. — Houston Chronicle
The Houston Chronicle takes a look at the growing movement to rediscover and preserve the forgotten African American burial grounds of Texas by highlighting the story of the Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery. The push to save and memorialize African American cemeteries is part of a larger... View full entry
Alongside a wider effort to uncover and rediscover the lost and forgotten histories of historically marginalized groups and populations, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has recently taken steps to uncover the 18th century living-history museum's queer legacies. In a recent... View full entry
The National Trust and its partners have led advocacy efforts to increase funding for five competitive grant programs: the African American Civil Rights Grant Program, the Underrepresented Community Grant Program, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Grant Program, Save America’s Treasures, and the Historic Revitalization Subgrant Program. In total, these competitive grant programs received $41 million in FY 2019. — Saving Places
The National Trust for Historic Preservation breaks down some of the recently expanded funding opportunities that have taken shape at the federal level earmarked for the preservation of diverse and inclusive built heritage. Highlighted programs include the African American Civil Rights... View full entry
In Central Park, about a mile from land that was once home to Seneca Village, a mostly black community forced out by the park’s creation in the 1850s, the city is planning a privately funded monument to a revered black family from that time.
The new addition to New York’s landscape, honoring the Lyons family, is part of the de Blasio administration’s push to diversify the city’s public art and recognize overlooked figures from its history.
— The New York Times
The privately funded plaque, paid for by the Ford, JPB, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, will become the second monument to Seneca Village in the park, following a public plaque erected in recent years. At its height, the village stretched from 82nd to... View full entry
On August 14, 2019, the Dallas City Council unanimously approved a resolution that temporarily halts the use of public funds on any further demolitions in Tenth Street—an important move given that to date, at least 70 of the district’s 260 homes have been demolished. Thanks to a broad-based coalition effort bolstered by the media attention of the 11 Most listing, this vote removes the immediate threat to the neighborhood and helps advance the cause. — Saving Places
